


Paradise Lost

by sunflowerwonder



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Dirk only buys sugar cereal, Existential Crisis, M/M, Morning After, Sexual Content, drug references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-07
Updated: 2016-04-07
Packaged: 2018-05-31 19:29:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6484636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflowerwonder/pseuds/sunflowerwonder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This world is impermanent.</p>
<p>Your island was an existence of isolation and bounded freedom, but it was home. It was solid. It was safe. It was familiar and vibrant and warmed from the sun of an untouched paradise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paradise Lost

**Author's Note:**

> Written and posted via mobile for your typo-filled inconvenience.

This world is impermanent.

Your island was an existence of isolation and bounded freedom, but it was home. It was solid. It was safe. It was familiar and vibrant and warmed from the sun of an untouched paradise.

The world you live in now shifts more than the sands of the beaches you used to call home. It throws off your footing–slides through your grip. Days seem to flow through your mind as quickly as money slides out your pockets. People race past your peripheral view and while you can’t afford to muster the effort you feel guilty for not knowing their names.

The man below you grips your back like a lifeline in a tropical storm but you’ve learned by now that these people, and especially these people, don’t stay. He moans your name into the crease of your neck and amidst the chaos of your post-island life you’re surprised he bothered to remember it.

In the morning he lights a cigarette. The smoke makes you choke and excuse yourself to a bathroom you don’t know the location of. The apartment is cluttered and old–the kind you’ve learned caters only to broke college kids and drug dealers. You haven’t learned which one he is yet. Your mind can do nothing but place one foot in front of the other with fake confidence, riffling through doors in a hallway until you’re finally able to lock yourself away in a linoleum-tiled peace.

You keep telling yourself you’re seeking stability yet keep ending up in foreign apartments.

Someone knocks on the door but you don’t answer. The isolation feels like a warm hug, the fluorescents washing out your face to form an uncanny valley of sunshine.

“I need a blasted shrink,” you mumble to yourself, a sticky hand stuttering as it drags up your tired face. It combs through sweaty hair already thoroughly tousled by last night’s tryst. You’re desperate for a shower but not enough to stick around such a decrepit apartment. Your eyes shift away from the bruises dotting the plane of your neck. You don’t need further proof that you are a paradise lost.

“Yo. You about done in there? Because this is a one bath condo with no flushing power for post-coital regret.”

His voice is coarse and abrasive and tainted with a crude urban tone. He bangs on the door a few times and you flinch, begging for just a few more moments to collect your thoughts. He’d been so charming last night. You fear you’ll never catch on to the two faced disorder so prevalent in everyone you meet.

You gather your courage and throw open the door with a surging force. You brush past him without a word. You don’t look at his surprised expression. You don’t listen to the “fuck,” he hisses when the hinged wood catches his foot. You gather your clothes and slip them on like sandpaper. You both deserve your punishments.

When you make to turn towards an exit you again don’t know the location of, he’s still standing in that foreign hallway. Shaking out his foot and clutching the doorframe. He’s taller than you. An intimidating force dressed in nothing but boxer shorts and the lingering smoke of a bad habit. Everything about him makes your throat seize up and you stick yet another gold star on your life’s posterboard of regret.

“Jesus Christ,” the man says. You hate to admit you don’t know his name.

You have the strength not to respond but can’t bring yourself to shove past him. His posture is defensive now. Fingers clutch the fabric of his shorts.

“I knew this was a tough city to please, but I didn’t know I was sleeping with damn royalty.” His snarl is bitter, but his eyes dart around in something akin to confusion. A lost, unsure film glazes over them.

“I wasn’t that bad,” he continues with a huff, the hand clutching the fabric now mottled white from a lack of circulation. “I mean, I’m smaller than you, yeah, but I’m not below average. And I know I like to play it up a little, but you could have told me to shut up instead of waiting until morning to upchuck at the mere idea of sleeping with–”

“You weren’t too loud,” you say. Suddenly, awkwardly, and with all the grace of an overgrown child. He startles. The ever-darkening expression on his face halts.

“The smoking–I don’t like the smoke,” you decide to elaborate. “Or morning-afters, in general. So. Excuse me.”

His expression softens, as if he was expecting an insult and found himself pleasantly surprised. Ego driven, you can’t help but think. It’s a note that rings with a bitter piano key. The more time you spend around other humans the more you find yourself disliking their, and by extension your own, nature.

“Sensitive,” he says. He hasn’t moved yet. Drafts from a recently extinguished flame flare your nose. “Must not have grown up in this neck of the metropolitan woods.”

“No,” you say. “I didn’t.”

He relaxes, content with this response, and slinks out of the way. “Just tell me to put it out,” he mutters. He grabs a shirt from a pile on the floor and slips it over freckled shoulders.

You find yourself seated on the crumpled sheets of the bed again. You should be winding through pedestrians on a lengthy walk of shame to your own aging apartment, but you’re not.

There is a yellowed window looking over a gritty street full of taxis and commuters. There is an ashtray, a pack of cigarettes, and a plastic bag full of questionable legality on the dresser. There is a crack in the paint on the wall and water damage on the ceiling. There is a half-naked, tired-eyed, insecure man glaring at you from the other side of the mattress, trying to say something constructive but unable to make a connection.

“So,” he says. “You want breakfast?”

You stare at him.

“This is all there is,” you whisper, voice painfully frail.

A blurred wetness floods your eyes as the futility of it all hits you like that first punch to the stomach you got at a bar your second week in the city. You were going to die in this place. Going to keel over in the ever-shifting puzzle of a civilization where the faces are procedurally generated and the points don’t matter. You thought humanity was a scarring plane crash on your island but no, humanity was you, and your island was nothing but a small garden trying to keep you from the truth of your own existence.

But you know now.

“Chill out,” the man says. “Hey, it was just a hook up. Don’t have a fucking existential crisis on me."

You eat breakfast with him.

It’s a quiet affair full of awkward glances and the crunch of overly sweet cereal.

“You seem like you’ve got a lot going on upstairs,” he says, afterwords, slipping a crumpled post-it note into your hand. You catch a glimpse of a smile and your memory clings to it. “But I can dig it, I guess. Better than the opposite.”

“Dirk,” is scrawled next to a messy number and complimentary winky face. It’s so unsubtle it fails to be anything but genuine. Did he not just see your flaws? Did you not just witness his? Yet he stands there with a brief wave and a closing door as if you were fresh acquaintances finishing up brunch. You don’t think you will ever come to understand this world. So complex and confusing, so guided by social mechanics you don’t know the rules of.

You make a point to remember his name.


End file.
